I was recently informed via email that I could be entitled to a share of a settlement from a class-action lawsuit. The company being sued denied wrongdoing but agreed to the settlement to avoid an expensive legal battle. I admire this company and have used its product for years. My suspicion is that the lawyers behind the lawsuit are bounty hunters exploiting a technicality. Should I still file for my share of the settlement? (It would be modest — enough to take my husband out for dinner.) If I don’t take my sharenice88, everyone else will just get more. — Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

I admire your scruples about this relatively small amount of money. From one perspective, the company and the class-action lawyers are both economic actors; the company’s legal team will have made their best assessment of its potential losses, as the opposing lawyers will have made their best assessment of their potential gains, and they will have litigated or negotiated accordingly. Still, if you are right — and you ought to spend a little more time to satisfy yourself that you are — taking your share would mean going along with a scheme that wrongly exploits the class-action system. Your suspected bounty hunters wouldn’t really be contributing to either of the two desirable ends that can recommend such suits: compensating those who have been wronged and discouraging future offenses. Giving up your share wouldn’t change this, of course. But at least the affair wouldn’t be something you took part in or benefited from. Why not let your husband take you out to dinner and celebrate that?

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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTReaders Respond

The previous question was from a reader who was trying to make a big decision. He wrote: “I manage the summer-intern program for my team at a major global financial institution. Together with two other colleagues, I decide to whom we wish to offer full-time positions at the end of the term. Our interns come from an array of socioeconomic and academic backgrounds and perform their duties with varying degrees of skill. Those coming from more well-to-do backgrounds appear to be performing better than those who come from less privileged backgrounds. When providing our final evaluations and ranking these interns, should we take their personal life circumstances into consideration? Or must we evaluate interns solely on job performance? We have been given no guidance on this from our program management.”

In his response, the Ethicist noted: “We live in a class society. People who are rich in financial terms tend to be rich in cultural and social capital too: They have social assets, resources and connections. All these forms of advantage can contribute to an employee’s actual performance. But they can also contribute to the employee’s perceived performance. … So you can ask yourself whether your judgment about which of these interns is doing best has been shaped by features that don’t reflect the contribution they’re likely to make. You’re obviously alert to this possibility, because you write that the more privileged interns ‘appear’ to be performing better; it’s worth thinking about whether you can identify evaluative measures that are less subject to this kind of bias. … Firms like yours compete fiercely to get their top candidates, which is one reason salaries in finance can be so high. But — if you’ll permit the provocation — I wonder how much difference it would make to your profits if you made a habit of picking the person that you had ranked third or fifth.” (Reread the full question and answer here.)

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